Lott Yearns for Order Amid Senate Chaos : New majority leader's disciplined ways go against the grain of an unruly institution.

By JANET HOOK

July 31, 1996 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

WASHINGTON — Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) is the kind of guy who loves charts, lists and schedules. He likes his meetings to start on time, move briskly and end promptly. And he thinks people should walk the straight and narrow, in designated crosswalks, when they traverse the Capitol’s broad plaza.

Lott is, in short, a disciplined man for whom organization is a way of life. All of a sudden, he finds himself trying to lead an institution that for the last two centuries has defied organization and, especially in election years, has been as undisciplined as a pack of spaniels.

The result, increasingly evident in the weeks since the Mississippi Republican succeeded Bob Dole as Senate majority leader, is a spectacular clash between the forces of activism and inertia.

Lott is trying hard, and with some success, to break election year logjams that have prevented the GOP from claiming major legislative accomplishments. But the former University of Mississippi cheerleader also has run headlong into a harsh reality of the Senate: It takes little effort for a determined minority to hogtie the place, and the majority leader has few tools to stop them.

“Lott clearly wants to make an early impression and plant the flag and tell the world: ‘Trent Lott is here and things are going to be different,’ ” says Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University who studies Congress. “But he has this creaky, 210-year-old institution, and it’s not going to change to suit a new leader.”

Lott is making some headway in moving the creaky old Senate by using the same blunt tools of leadership wielded by his predecessors: giving stern lectures to balky colleagues, threatening weekend sessions and all-nighters, and cajoling warring factions. After seeing the Senate grind to a virtual standstill, Lott this month managed to break a filibuster on a nuclear waste disposal bill, pass several long-stalled measures, including the Pentagon budget, and break an impasse over a minimum-wage increase. This week, the last before Congress begins a monthlong summer recess, Lott plans to bring up for final action two bills that could be the GOP’s biggest legislative accomplishments of the year: a major overhaul of the welfare system and a health insurance reform bill.

“The institution looks better and better,” a sanguine Lott said recently.

Lott could hardly have picked a more difficult time to take over as leader of the Senate, which in the best of times is hard to lead. Senate rules give each senator so much power and autonomy that Lott once compared the job of enforcing party discipline in the Senate to “trying to put bullfrogs in a wheelbarrow.” The Senate is particularly prone to gridlock now, midway through an election year, because partisanship is running high and time is running short.

Lott stepped into this briar patch in mid-June, after Dole left Congress to run for president full time. In his inaugural acts as leader, Lott clearly has tried to establish a reputation for being a can-do, hands-on pragmatist.

“He recognizes that what happens in the first few months will establish his reputation as leader,” says Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). “One aspect of his image he’s had to put to rest was this impression that he is an ideologue” who is more conservative than Dole.

Lott moved quickly to end a logjam that had bedeviled Dole for weeks: He reached an agreement with Democrats for handling their priority, which was the legislation to raise the minimum wage, and a companion bill to provide tax breaks for small businesses. He also ended an impasse that had held up the renomination of Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

That was the easy part. For weeks, Lott’s determined efforts to cut a deal on the health bill foundered. Democrats threw up roadblocks at every turn. At times, the Senate’s gridlock got so bad that impasses were colliding with each other. Infuriated by Democratic obstinance on the health bill, Republicans refused to send the minimum-wage bill to a House-Senate conference committee for final drafting. Angered by the nuclear waste bill, opponents filibustered the defense budget bill.

It all came to a head one especially contentious day when Democrats blocked a slew of bills because Lott refused to let them offer controversial amendments.

“Things are all balled up, and it’s not my fault,” Lott fumed that day after he took the unusual step of calling all 99 of his colleagues to the Senate chamber for a lecture demanding an end to obstructionism. Alternately plaintive and furious, Lott compared himself to the cartoon character Charlie Brown: Every time he ran up to kick the football, someone pulled it away.

Lott’s complaints about the Senate’s institutional inertia echo the words of legions of past majority leaders, including a Democratic predecessor, Sen. George J. Mitchell of Maine, who as leader in 1994 battled against the successful opposition tactics of Dole.

But the stubborn realities of the Senate seem particularly frustrating to Lott, his colleagues say, because he so likes to run a tight ship.

“Trent is a doer, an activist,” observes Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Me.), who says he typically comes to meetings armed with lists or charts. “This is very frustrating for him. His outgoing, affable way belies another side of him, a person who is always organized.”

That orderly side of Lott has surfaced in matters legislative, personal and political.

As assistant majority leader under Dole, Lott ran his team of deputies “like a military organization,” says Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.).

While he was campaigning to become leader, Lott kept track of his colleagues on a color-coded tally sheet that he kept in his suit pocket at all times.

As leader, he has banned any of his aides except his press secretary from talking to reporters, and he has barred journalists from strolling into the leader’s press office as they were accustomed to doing under Dole. He’s even discouraging fellow senators from dropping by without an appointment. “It’s just a matter of not wanting his office turned into Grand Central Station, so he can go about his work in a more orderly fashion,” says Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.).

Lott has asked House GOP leaders for more focused meetings. “He wants an agenda, he wants to keep up the tempo,” says a top House aide. “He’s almost hyper at times to move on to the next item.”

In personal appearance, Lott is meticulous: Without fail, he appears in well-tailored suits, crisp white shirts and a helmet of perfectly coiffed auburn hair.

All that helped fuel two rumors that spread through the Capitol like wildfire after he took over as leader. One was that Lott had a strict dress code for women in his office--skirts and lipstick required, pants prohibited--a rumor that he flatly denied. The Capitol also was abuzz with reports that Lott was behind a new police policy of requiring pedestrians to stay strictly within the marked crosswalks on the plaza around the Capitol. Lott disavowed responsibility for the pedestrian policy, which he said came from the chief of police, but he defended the practice.

“There was an accident waiting to happen out there,” Lott told reporters.

Lott and the police took so much flak for the policy--mostly from journalists who park their cars on the far side of the plaza--that enforcement of the crosswalk policy has been relaxed.

As tensions between the police and pedestrians began to ease, so too has Lott seen improvements in relations between Republicans and Democrats.

“You know how the Senate is,” he told reporters recently. “Sometimes it looks like it’s hopelessly tied up, and then things are able to break loose.”